Fighting with data transfer

I bought a Mac Mini a few weeks ago, as regular readers may remember… Anyhow, I got the box finally and installed it during the weekend in the living room. My idea is to replace an old Windows HTPC box that is too noisy and takes too long to boot.

The HTPC has our collection of audio and video files that needed to be transferred to the Mac Mini. This seemed to be a simple task, as I have two free FireWire disks, 320GB and 500GB.

The smaller disk was already formatted into Mac format, and I didn’t want to purchase MacDrive, so that option was ruled out immediately.

Thus, I formatted the second disk to NTFS and plugged it in to the HTPC. I moved all files to the disk (a big mistake…), plugget it out and plugget it into the mac. Mac aptly noticed that it cannot read the disk and prompted to initialise it. Of course, I declined and tried again. No luck.

Then I decided to plug the disk into another PC and transfer the files over the network — gigabit ethernet is a really sweet thing…

For some reason, the disk was no longer recognised by the other PC. Cold sweat emerged above my eyebrows… I fought half an hour with the disk and PC, connecting the disk with FireWire and USB to different ports and booting PC once a while.

Finally the disk worked, for a while, using USB, so I could copy one file to the PC’s disk. Then booted and copied a dozen files more. Then booted and copied the rest of the files. Phew! For some reason the mac mangled the disk so that PC could not write it. The disk failed every time some program tried to write something.

Then I copiedthe files to Mac over the network. After spending most of the day, the files had moved half a meter from PC to Mac. Moral of the story: do not connect too big NTFS FireWire drives to Mac and never just move files between computers, copy instead.